"If you care a lot about the future, it shows that you believe in what you're doing now and you think it's worthwhile enough to have some lasting impact." – Syd Mead

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Paul Murphy saw fit to give me another guest spot on his blog, called “The tattered history of OOP”, talking about the history of OOP practice, where the idea came from, and how industry has implemented it. If you’ve been reading my blog this will probably be review. I’m just spreading the message a little wider.

Paul has an interesting take on the subject. He thinks OOP is a failure in practice because with the way it’s been implemented it’s just another way to make procedure calls. I agree with him for the most part. He’s informed me that he’s going to put up another post soon that gets further into why he thinks OOP is a failure. I’ll update this post when that’s available.

In short, where I’m coming from is that OOP, in the original vision that was created at Xerox PARC, still has promise. The current implementation that most developers use has architectural problems that the PARC version did not, and it still promotes a mode of thinking that’s compatible with procedural programming.

Update 6/3/08: Paul Murphy’s response to my article is now up, called “Oddball thinking about OOP”. He argues that OOP is a failure because it’s an idea that was incompatible with digital computing to begin with, and is better suited to analog computing. I disagree that this is the reason for its failure, but to each their own.

Update 8/1/09: I realized later I may have misattributed a quote to Albert Einstein. Paul Murphy talked about this in a post sometime after “The tattered history of OOP” was published. I said that insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Murphy said he realized that this was misattributed to Einstein. I did a little research myself and it seems like there’s confusion about it. I’ve found sites of quotations that attribute this saying to Einstein. On Wikipedia though it’s attributed to Rita Mae Brown, a novelist, who wrote this in her 1983 book, Sudden Death. I don’t know. I had always heard it attributed to Einstein, though I agree with the naysayers that no one has produced a citation that would prove he said it.